A couple of years ago my workflow (. In lightroom) was to convert all my raw files (tiffs from a canon 1ds ml 1) into dngs. Now using capture one I can "tell" COPro7 to profile the files as per this camera but can't get much functionality to lens correction features. Does anyone know how to remedy this? Thanks in advance.

CO Pro 7 uses specific information from the raw file for the lens correction to act upon. As far as I know that information from the original raw file was (and is) not translated into a converted DNG file. As a result the lens correction has fairly limited functionality on these type of files.

It needs the original raw file.

Having said that, I noticed that the lens correction tool works better (read: more automatically) with more recent raw file formats compared to earlier raw files, probably due to missing information altogether in the original raw file as well.

I think you may find that getting the information that lens provides (if it does) is great but that is just the start point for going to some tables that connect the information from the lens to information from the sensor and so on and then linking to some tables of measurements made separately and individually by the vendors (in the case of C1 and DxO and others as I understand it) before combining the entire result into something that "tweaks" the incoming RAW data to obtain what the developers believe to be the best result they can deliver.

Recent small compacts that offer RAW file formats are an interesting comparison point for the RAW vs an in body produced jpg. The entire concept at that level is the lenses could never be made (or certainly not at a cost effective price) for their position in the market. So the manufacturers take a different route and make something that is good enough once "fixed" in software but is also possible to make consistently enough to be "fixed" by software.

As I understand it it not just simply a matter of ready some lens data and applying a few standard tweaks. It's not even that simple applying fixes to a 8bit jpg.

On the other hand if producing a relatively low resolution image for a small print, screen viewing or social media the concept of lens correction may not really be that important. It's a matter of making the effort (or investing in a solution) where it has most value as far as the user is concerned.

Ive tried to look more up on this but most discussion is about proprietary raw vs DNG. Any update on my original question? I did for a while convert my camera raw formats (.tiff) to DNG using lightroom (where I still catalogue my files) and if I then catalogue them in CO8 I cant get full file functionality as if it was a proprietary raw file (like others I never converted.) Is there a work around? Proponents say that DNG contains all the data in a different container, but maybe one has to use another converter to take the DNG back to the original raw to allow CO to see it natively again. Can anyone help inform me? Thanks